During a series of magnetic recording disk manufacturing operations, a disk's surface is exposed to various types of contaminants. Any material present in a manufacturing operation is a potential source of contamination. For example, sources of contamination may include process gases, chemicals, deposition materials, and liquids. The various contaminants may be deposited on the disk's surface in particulate form. If the particulate contamination is not removed, it may interfere with the proper fabrication of a magnetic recording disk. Therefore, it is necessary to clean contamination from the surface of the disk at one or more stages in the manufacturing process, such as post sputtering.
Contamination may be removed using sonication and rinsing techniques. The function of sonication cleaning is to remove a majority of the removable particulates from the disk. The function of rinse cleaning is to further remove loose particulates while keeping the cleaning liquid cleaner than during the sonication.
Some conventional disk cleaning systems perform sonication cleaning while oscillating the disks as illustrated in FIG. 1A, which may be referred to as dynamic sonication. Other conventional disk cleaning systems perform sonication cleaning without oscillation of the disks as illustrated in FIG. 1B, which may be referred to as static sonication. With or without oscillation of the disks, the cleaning mechanism and efficiency of conventional cleaning methods could be significantly different depending on the oscillation position, the sonication power, and the cleaning liquid circulation cross flow rate.